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Read the West Book Club: News of the World

A 2016 National Book Award finalist, News of the World by poet and novelist Paulette Jiles is now a major motion picture. In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young Kiowa captive back across Texas to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel …

Read the West Book Club: Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West

H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the American West's settling, from John Jacob Astor's fur-trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, and from the California gold rush to Oklahoma’s land runs. The West was a region where riches could potentially reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage and the railroad man's …

Read the West Book Club- The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. Through riveting new evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, and Indian captives, The Other Slavery reveals nothing less …

Read the West Book Club — Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather's best-known novel is an epic — almost mythic — story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the Southwestern desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, …

Read the West Book Club—Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality

In 1917 Mabel Sterne (Mabel Dodge Luhan), patron of the arts and spokeswoman for the New York avant-garde, came to the Southwest seeking a new life. This autobiographical account is a remarkable description of an Easterner's journey to the American West. It is also a great story of personal and philosophical transformation. The geography of …

Read the West Book Club: The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a 13-year-old pioneer traveling west, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Oatman’s story has become legend, inspiring artworks, fiction, film and radio plays. …

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